An Enemy of the People: A New Version by Christopher Hampton Book

Norwegian Henrik Ibsen's The Enemy of the People, first produced in 1882, is what we might now call a "whistleblower" tale. Dr. Stockman, brother of the town's "Burgomaster," Peter, investigates the source of the resort town's fortunes, The Baths, and discovers it is being polluted, and for the health of locals and visitors, recommends that it be shut down. Dr. Stockman becomes "the enemy of the people" in this play because he stands against the town's position that The Baths must continue regardless of its threat to public health; they need the money too much.

I know what you're thinking: It can't happen here! (or, same ol', same ol'.)

Peter, the Burgomaster: It is you, in your blind obstinancy, want to cut off the town's chief source of prosperity!
Dr. Stockmann [his brother]: That source is poisoned, man! Are you mad? We live by trafficking in filth and corruption!

Maybe you have heard of the 2017 film The Post? Chelsea Manning? Edward Snowden? The raiding of the Arctic for oil? Flint? 45 and his Billionaire Boys Club making it illegal to use terms such as "climate change" or "global warming" because these words are tools of the anti-business socialists trying to keep America From being Great again, and the liberal media grinding out fake news? Well, then this (prophetic) play may be just the play for you.

Is it too dark a vision to swallow? You decide, but Ibsen sees what "progress" is made through greed: "All our sources of spiritual life are poisoned, and our whole society lies upon a pestilential basis of falsehood."'Dr. Stockmann

However you see it, in this play, the Burgomaster knows how to save The Baths and how to preserve (well, for the present, anyway) the economic health of the town: By firing the doctor and taking control of the media and the language used to talk about water.

I am also in the middle of a terrific book of journalism, Dan Egan's award-winning The Death and Life of the Great Lakes, which in part documents the pitting, on the one hand, the mindless greed and ignorance that continues to put at risk the source of the remaining 20% of the planet's surface freshwater against, on the other hand, the ingenuity and resourcefulness of scientists (wait; is it legal for me to use that word now?) to save it. These two books seem to speak to each other, sadly.

Trump, as you know, decided to roll back the Clean Water Act, which to my mind is essential to the survival of the Great Lakes, and necessary to the survival of the planet:



Some modernist frameworks assume that Mankind only gets better each year, knows better, and progresses ever onward to some Higher State. If this is true, how did old Ibsen in 1882 know what we would still be facing today? Chilling, prescient, elegant, The Enemy of the People has been produced as a (dark) comedy, but I think, as with Bertolt Brecht's dark comedy, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, about the rise of facism in Chicago, I expect the Goodman Theater production of An Enemy of the People can no longer be produced as a comedy.